PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. date: 07 June 2020

Emerging Accounts of Altruism

Emerging Accounts of Altruism

“Love Creation's Final Law”?

Chapter:

(p.212)
13 Emerging Accounts of
Altruism

Source:

Altruism and Altruistic Love

Author(s):

Jeffrey P. Schloss

Publisher:

Oxford University Press

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195143584.003.0019

Darwinism contributed a theory by which the brutality of nature could be viewed as redemptively generating beneficial outcomes. The significant aspect of inclusive fitness theory is that it not only makes sense of many previously puzzling behaviors but that it also reconceptualizes fitness to entail both progeny and kin. The picture of human nature that thus emerges is one wholly governed by “nepotism and favoritism”. Critics of such conclusions drawn from initial sociobiological applications of kin selection and reciprocal altruism theory have described it as a “slapdash egoism, a natural expression of people's lazy-minded vanity, an armchair game of cops and robbers which saves them the trouble of real inquiry and flatters their self-esteem.”

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PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. date: 07 June 2020